by Tim Powers
The flare was dazzling, but the noise of the gunshot was just a thud against his abused eardrums. He fired again, and then Plumtree had leaned out of the truck and closed her fist in the fabric of his shirt. The truck was moving, slowly. Cochran flailingly pulled the trigger again, and one of the Saturn’s headlights exploded; and then he threw the gun onto the truck floor and lunged inside.
Pete must have floored the accelerator then, for Cochran was tumbled into the seat half across Plumtree’s lap, and the door slammed shut without his help. The interior of the truck was dark in the renewed rainstorm.
“—the fuck were you doing—!” Pete was shouting, and Cochran yelled back, overriding him, “It was Dr. Armentrout!” In the instant of silence this news caused, Cochran sat up and added, “In that car. He would have followed us. He shot Kootie, remember?”
The roar of the engine rose and fell as Pete swerved from lane to lane to pass slower-moving cars. He had switched on the headlights, and the road ahead was only dimly visible behind a glittering curtain of rain.
“Good,” panted Angelica, “that was good, you were right to shoot him.” She was glancing around wildly, wide-eyed. “What the fuck hit us, Pete? How can the truck be running? We should be—”
“The god hit you,” said Mrs. Winchester from the shadows beside Cochran, in a quavering voice that seemed to carry a trace of satisfaction, “a good deal less hard than he hit my house in 1906.”
“I didn’t shoot him,” said Cochran loudly, “I shot the car, the radiator.”
“We’ve got to cross the 280 and pick up Kootie and Arky,” said Pete.
“No,” said Angelica, “there were other white Saturns driving around back there, and Armentrout’s still fucking alive. We might lead them to Kootie—and this truck’s a beacon, magically and plain-old visually. And turn off your headlights.”
“These are sorcerous bad guys, Angie,” said Pete, nevertheless reaching forward to switch off the lights. “What do you think they were doing down here? Following us? I bet they were tracking the new king, which is Kootie. They might be zeroing in on Cochran’s house right now.”
“Ah, you’re right, you’re right,” said Angelica desperately. “Get on the freeway, get right over in the fast lane to draw any pursuit, and then cut off hard at the first off-ramp, hard enough to send ’em on past it, if they are following us. We’ll call Kootie from a pay phone.”
“It’s getting late, you must let this Kootie person fend for himself,” said Mrs. Winchester’s voice. “I heard that!” added Cody; “they’d surely kill the boy, and anyway we need his help, and Arky’s, to get this thing done.” And then Valorie’s flat voice said, “O, what form of prayer can serve my turn? ‘Forgive me my foul murder.’ ”
“A pay phone at a gas station,” said Pete, his wet shoe sole squeaking from the gas pedal to the brake and back. “We’re gonna need gas.”
Pete followed Angelica’s directions so exactly that Cochran thought they were all going to be killed. From the fast far left-hand lane of the northbound 280, while a scatter of anonymous headlight-pairs bobbed behind them at hard-to-judge distances, Pete cut the wheel sharply to the right, and the truck veered across the shiny black lanes like a banking surfboard, booming over the lane-divider dots in brief staccato bursts, finally half-missing the exit and throwing Cochran onto Plumtree again as the two left wheels slewed on the shoulder.
Then he had straightened the wheel, braked down to about twenty miles per hour without quite making the tires squeal, and pulled sedately into a Chevron gas station, steering the truck around to the back by the rest rooms and pay phones. The headlights were still switched off.
He pushed the gearshift lever over into neutral. “No—” he began, but his voice was squeaky; “nobody’s followed us here,” he said in a deeper tone.
“Guess not,” said Angelica faintly. Then she stirred herself and pushed open the door. “Let’s call …”
She froze with one leg extended out into the rain, and Cochran followed the direction of her gaze to the cone of light around the pay telephone.
At first glance he thought the light was full of moths; then he saw that the fluttering streaks of light were rain-gleams on transparent figures: the streak of a contorted jawline here, the squiggle of a flexed limb there, invisible wet lips working in imbecilic grimaces.
“Something’s got all the ghosts worked up this evening,” Angelica said. “They’re drawn by the magnets in the phone, or they each want to call somebody and haven’t got any quarters.” She gave Pete a stricken look over her shoulder. “I’m not masked enough for this. Breathing, talking on the phone, in that stew? My voice—and Arky might say my name! I couldn’t hide my—my psychic locators, my name, my birthday—from all of them. At least a couple of them would be into my head like piranhas in five seconds.”
“ ‘These same thoughts people this little world,’ ” said Mrs. Winchester confidently out of Plumtree’s mouth; to which Cody added, “All us kids on the bus got bogus birth-dates and somebody else’s picture on our IDs,” and the flat voice of Valorie said, “I shall play it in a mask, and you may speak as small as you will.”
“Oh, thank you—!” said Angelica to Plumtree, clearly at a loss as to what name to use. “Give her a quarter, Pete,” she added as Cochran opened the truck’s back door and stepped down into the rain. “Speak this: tell Kootie and Arky to get out of there,” she told Plumtree urgently. “Tell ’em don’t take the Granada, we were driving that when I shot at the bikers out at the yacht club, they might remember it. Tell ’em to take the old Torino out back.”
“And bad guys might be out in front of the house, nervous about our guns and waiting for reinforcements,” added Pete. “Tell Arky to drive right out through the greenhouse, like Cochran said this morning—there’s apparently a mud road that leads down the backyard slope right to the 280.”
Cochran could see that Plumtree had to do this, but after she had stepped wearily down out of the truck he grabbed her unbandaged hand and said, “Would it help to have another person beside you? I can concentrate on you, and not pay attention to the ghosts.”
The tired lines in her face lifted in a wan smile. “I’d like that, Sid. Yeah, you’ll be safe enough if you just don’t speak a word, and look nowhere but at me.”
“That’s my plan.” He was nervously pleased to be speaking coherently, after having drunk the pagadebiti; and he was reminded of a time an unidentified snake had bitten him on a hike, and how he had monitored himself for the rest of the day, watching for slurred speech or numbness or any other symptoms of poisoning.
Plumtree took a quarter from Pete, and then she and Cochran walked hand-in-hand across the pavement to the cone of rain-streaked and ghost-curdled light around the telephone.
The ghosts were whispering and giggling in Cochran’s ears, and though he tried not to listen he heard faint, buzzing sexual propositions, pleas for rides to other states, demands for money, offers to wash his car windows for a dollar.
Cochran kept his eyes on Plumtree. Her face was shifting in response to it all, like a fencer parrying in different lines, and once Cochran got a broad wink that he thought must have been from Tiffany. She reached through the contorting forms as if through cobwebs to drop the quarter into the slot, and punched his home number into the keypad as if emphasizing points by poking someone repeatedly in the chest.
After a few moments she tensed and said, “Hi. It’s me, the girl-of-a-thousand-faces. Use the old king’s eye as a scrambler to call me back at this number.” And she read off the number of the pay phone and hung up the receiver.
“Good thinking,” said Cochran through slitted lips.
“Don’t talk!—they could get down your throat. They do but jest, poison in their jest; no offense i’ the world.”
At last the telephone rang, and Plumtree snatched up the receiver. “Hello? Hello?” She took the receiver from her ear and knocked it against the aluminum cowl around the phone. “I’m deaf!” s
he said loudly. Into the phone she said, “Kootie, Arky, I hope you can hear me. I’m deaf, so just listen!” Her voice softened. “Arky, you’ve got the cutest butt. Out!” Cody yelled, apparently at Tiffany. “Listen, you’ve both got to get out of there, right now—take the—”
She looked at Cochran in panic, and he knew that it had just occurred to her that Janis was listening, and could relay their plans to Omar Salvoy, in her mental Snow White cottage. “The way Sid told Arky this morning, exactly that way, are you following me?”
She flipped the receiver around in her hand and bit the earpiece—and Cochran realized that she was hearing by bone conduction. She fumbled the receiver back to her ear. “Good, don’t say anything more, we’re being overheard here in spite of your scrambler, it’s enough that I know I’m not just talking to somebody who likes calling pay phones. Listen, we’re going, right now, to—to George Washington’s head.”
Cochran nodded. Janis hadn’t been on when they had hiked through the tunnel at the Sutro Bath ruins and seen the boulder that Kootie had said looked like Washington; and Cody wasn’t saying that this was the big event, happening today instead of tomorrow as they had all expected. Janis could relate all of this to her father without his knowing where Kootie and Mavranos would be going.
“Tell me you understand,” Cody said, and again bit the receiver. Then she said into the mouthpiece, “Good. Oh, and Kootie better bring that … that little yellow blanket that the bald lady gave him, if he’s still got it.” She sighed. “Go,” she added, and she hung up the chewed and spitty receiver. Cochran faintly heard one of the ghosts say that the telephone was for calling room service to order food, that one didn’t eat the telephone.
Plumtree took Cochran’s elbow and led him out of the swarm of idiot ghosts, and neither of them inhaled until they had got back to the truck.
“That was Kootie,” Plumtree panted, “and then Arky. They understood, and I didn’t hear either of ’em say anything that would clue anybody. They’ll meet us there.” She looked nervously at Cochran. “I can hear the rain, now, but I don’t know about voices. You say something.”
He smiled at her. “Vous êtes très magnifique,” he said, and he was sure that it had been his own deliberate decision to speak in French.
She laughed tiredly. “Thank you very kindly, sir, now I hear you clearly.”
“Back in the truck,” said Pete, “everybody. I don’t want Kootie to get there before we do. Sid, you got a ten for gas?”
CHAPTER 31
Yes. Like the mariner in the old story, the winds and streams had driven him within the influence of the Loadstone Rock, and it was drawing him to itself, and he must go.
—Charles Dickens,
A Tale of Two Cities
THE SECRET SWITCHBOARDS OF the city logged dozens of calls in the ordinarily slow witchery-and-wonders categories, as reports of supernatural happenings were phoned in from Daly City south of town up to the Sunset area around Ocean Beach and the Richmond district north of Golden Gate Park—accounts of brake-drums singing in human voices, root beers and colas turning into red wine in the cans, and voices of dead people intruding on radio receptions in unwelcome, clumsy karaoke. In Chinatown, under the street-spanning banners and the red-neon-bordered balconies and the white-underlit pagoda roofs, hundreds of nests of firecrackers were set hopping on the puddled sidewalks, clattering like machine-gun fire and throwing clouds of smoke through the rain, and the lean young men noisily celebrating the new year frequently paused below the murals of dragons and stylized clouds to listen to the storefront radio speakers, out of which echoed an Asian woman’s voice predicting earthquakes and inversions and a sudden high-pressure area locally.
Old Volkswagens and Chevrolets and Fords, painted gold and hung with wreaths at the front and back bumpers, roared with horns honking north through the hospital glare of the Stockton tunnel, to emerge in Chinatown at Sacramento Street still honking, the passengers firing handguns out the windows into the low sky. Police and paramedics’ sirens added to the din, and under the gunpowder banging and the electric howls was the constant hiss of the night rain, and the unending echoing rattle of the cables snaking at their steady nine-miles-an-hour through the street-pavement slots.
On the Bay Bridge, from remote Danville in the hills over on the east side of the bay, three white Saturns passed over the Coast Guard Reservation on Yerba Buena Island on their way in to the China Basin area of the Soma district; and two more were moving west up Ocean Avenue toward the Great Highway and Ocean Beach.
Dr. Armentrout had had to insist, almost tearfully, that the driver of the lead car get off the 280 at Ocean instead of continuing toward Chinatown.
Armentrout was sitting in the back beside Long John Beach and the two-figure manikin appliance, but the Lever Blank man in the front passenger seat shifted and said, “It’s the pomegranate.” He turned around. “What does it do, point?” When Armentrout just gripped the dry gourd and stared belligerently, the man added, “We won’t take it from you, if you tell us where we can get another one.”
“I picked it from a bush in the meadow where Scott Crane was killed,” Armentrout muttered finally, “at his compound in Leucadia.” He held the thing up and shook it, and dry seeds rattled inside. “In daylight, even such daylight as you get up here, its shadow is perceptibly displaced toward the king, which is the Koot Hoomie boy, I think. I’ve been—shadowing him.” He choked back a frightened giggle, and sniffed; he was still shaking, and his shirt was more clammy from sweat than from rain. “And,” he added, “tonight it … even tugs a little.” He nodded toward the windshield. “That way.”
Armentrout had hysterically demanded that the two-figure manikin appliance be brought along in this car too, and now it was sitting ludicrously in Long John Beach’s lap beside him. Armentrout wondered if Long John Beach too found the two figures heavier lately than they used to be.
“The royal tree,” said Long John Beach from behind the two Styrofoam heads, in what Armentrout had come to think of as the Valerie-voice, “hath left us royal fruit.”
“It led us to the red truck,” said the driver, “back there in Colma where we had to switch cars. Was the boy in the truck?”
“I don’t know,” said Armentrout. “I don’t think so.” Sid Cochran and Janis Plumtree were in the truck, he thought. And Sid Cochran, who I heedlessly let slip through my net back at Rosecrans Medical, shot a gun at me! “I think they were all staying somewhere in the area, and we just ran across the truck before we found the boy. But they must have gone to him after they evaded you people, or else they called him.” He shook the pomegranate again, and felt its inertial northward pull. “The primary is certainly northwest of us now. I can’t imagine why Salvoy didn’t call me—we could have been waiting for the boy right now, at whatever place they’re going to, instead of just chasing him this way.”
The radio on the dashboard clicked, and then an amplified voice said, “I thought we were going to where the Macondray chapel used to be.”
The driver unhooked a microphone from the console. “The—” He smiled at Armentrout in the rear-view mirror. “—dousing rod is apparently indicating the west coast,” he said. “Tell the brothers coming in from Danville not to waste time circling the Washington and Stockton site. Straight west on Turk to Balboa, tell them, and link up with us probably somewhere below the Cliff House.”
“Aye aye,” said the man in the following car, and clicked off; and Armentrout thought eye-eye, and remembered the tiny pupils of Plumtree’s eyes.
“The woman who pulled … the gunman back into the truck,” Armentrout said, “was Janis Plumtree, the one with your man Salvoy in her head. I’d like to … have her, after Salvoy has moved on.” Moved on to his eternal reward, ideally, he thought.
“Everybody except the king has got to be retired, sorry,” said the man in the front passenger seat. “But we do have to wait until we figure out who the king is, and what body he’s in.” He reached out and unhook
ed the microphone. “Andre,” he said, “tell the field men not to go shooting anybody until the subjects are out of the vehicles, and even then no women or boys. Got it?”
The driver was shaking his head. “Crisis of faith!” he said quietly.
“Nix,” came the voice from the radio. “The field men understand that the true king can’t be hit with a casual bullet.”
“But he might not be in his chosen body yet!” protested the man in the front seat. “You can tell ’em that, can’t you? It’s nothing but the truth.”
“Better we don’t introduce the complication,” insisted the voice from the radio; “and hope for the best.”
The man replaced the microphone and fogged the window with a sigh. “Field men,” he said. “Manson-family rejects.”
“Knuckleheads, panheads, and shovelheads,” agreed the driver. “Look, the Koot Hoomie body is the king, and it’ll deflect bullets. All we stand to lose is old Salvoy in the Plumtree, and that might not be altogether a bad thing.”
Armentrout touched the little lump in his jacket pocket that was the derringer. No casual bullet, he thought. But nothing fired from this gun is casual, and I’ve got a couple of very serious .410 shot-shells in it. That’s the way this has got to work out—these Lever Blank boys kill the Plumtree body and everybody in it, and I kill the Parganas boy.
And then stay well clear of the zealot field men.
On the long straight stretch of the Great Highway with the black-iron sea to the west, a relayed spot of darkness moved up the coast as each of the sodium-vapor streetlights went out for a moment when the red truck sped past on the pavement below.
Pete Sullivan was driving, and beside him Angelica was irritably drying off the .45 carbine with a handful of paper towels. The knapsack with the spare magazines had been under the seat too, and was also soaked by the rain water that had puddled on the floorboards.
She laid the gun down on the seat, then snapped open the glove compartment; and when she shifted around to look back at Cochran and Plumtree, she was holding the pagadebiti in her hands. “I never brought the … the hardware into your house,” she said to Cochran. “I think the Wild Turkey bottle that had Crane’s blood in it is behind you, in the hub of Arky’s spare tire.”
